Idle thoughts on cinema in 500 words (give or take a few). by Ian Scott Todd

3.17.2013

Excessive laughter

Evil Dead II: the comic excess of horror.

Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead
II (1987) is less a sequel to his
original Evil Dead (1983) than
a remake of it: both films open with Ash (Bruce Campbell) heading to a remote
cabin in the woods with his girlfriend, unaware that he’ll be spending most of
the weekend doing battle with murderous zombies.In his essay “Lethal Repetition,” Richard Dyer suggests that
the horror genre is as compelled to repeat acts of violence as its villains are—that,
in its endless proliferation of sequels and remakes, it plays out the same
scenarios, images, and plots with a single-minded obsession not to be found in
other genres.I would argue that
the Evil Dead films do not just
exemplify the horror genre’s compulsion to repeat itself across multiple films:
repetition is built into the very structure of each individual film, both of
which are driven by a series of gags rather than by any real plot.The films are simply about the
progression and escalation of human-zombie encounters, which grow increasingly
gorier and more absurdly comic as each film goes on.They’re determined to sustain this keyed-up, giddy feeling
of sublime disgust until, finally, they (and we) collapse, exhausted.

The gags are funny and
horrifying, often at the same time.In Evil Dead II, which
is more broadly comic than the original, one of Ash’s own hands becomes
possessed, prompting him to cut it off, whereupon it continues to pursue and
attack him like an animal.The
general vibe of both films is one of insane, hysterical laughter, as if the
slow dread of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead was ratcheted up to a slapsticky, funhouse
pitch.Raimi was apparently
influenced by The Three Stooges;
the films also resemble the balletic violence of the Looney Tunes
cartoons.The bodies of both the
humans and the zombies are cartoon bodies: they lose limbs and great quantities
of blood, fall through walls and floors, are slammed and dragged and beaten and
stabbed, yet they remain resilient and always ready for more. And they’re aware
of how funny they are: both films feature sequences in which characters are
consumed by prolonged, maniacal laughter.It’s not that the bodies are necessarily repeating the same actions over
and over again; it’s that they’re in constant, uninterrupted states of excess—bleeding,
screaming, running, oozing.And,
like Road Runner or Wile E. Coyote, they’re in constant, schizophrenic motion.

I understood the comic
appeal of this even as a kid, when I saw (and loved) the first Evil Dead film (I had programmed our VCR to tape it as it
aired on the USA network at 2 a.m. one night).Somehow, I understood it to be hilariously, nauseatingly
funny.Although, like the
second Godfather film, Evil
Dead II is generally felt to be
superior to its predecessor, my loyalties lie with the original, perhaps
because it seems less consciously cheeky and less emphatic about underscoring
how silly its excesses are.It
simply piles on the blood and the gore and the guts with a kind of deadpan
grimace until, feeling as if you’re about to be crushed beneath the weight of
so much bodily stuff, you can’t
help but break out in deranged laughter.